The Denver Post newspaper building at 101 W. Colfax Ave. is shown in this photo. (AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post)

Humble brag: Cannabist surpasses High Times in unique visitors for first time

The Denver Post attracted 6.7 million unique visitors in August, according to comScore

Published: Oct 12, 2016, 7:25 am • Updated: Oct 12, 2016, 7:25 am

By Daniel Petty, The Denver Post

The Denver Post’s digital properties in August continued their pattern of month-over-month and year-over-year gains, according to digital analytics firm comScore.

The organization attracted 6.739 million unique visitors for the month, up 52.8 percent year-over-year and the third consecutive month of growth. The total was up 5 percent from July. On mobile devices, The Post attracted 5.377 million unique visitors, reflecting an ongoing industry-wide shift as people increasingly consume news on mobile devices instead of desktop computers.

The Cannabist, The Post’s niche digital product covering the cannabis industry in Colorado and the U.S., attracted 885,000 unique visitors, surpassing High Times — long a media leader in the space — for the first time since the site launched in late 2013. High Times drew 558,000 unique visitors for August, a 38.4 percent year-over-year decrease, comScore reported. The Weedmaps-owned Marijuana.com — in operation since 1995 — drew 915,000 unique visitors in the same period.

The Post continued to reach more people in the Denver market. The three month average of June, July and August showed The Post reached 15.4 percent of people six and older with access to the internet, according to comScore. 9NEWS reached 9.3 percent over the same period. In August alone, The Post reached 14 percent of the Denver market to 9NEWS’ 8.5 percent.

9NEWS logged 31 million page views in August compared with The Post’s 24 million, comScore estimated.

The Post’s video-production initiative video continues to show gains. In August, video views on its owned and operated digital properties showed 82 percent year-over-year growth, drawing 1.26 million views to its own content. When factoring video in from partners and syndication, that number jumped to nearly 1.6 million.

Those figures do not include additional views from video produced for social media platforms, which The Post’s video team has increasingly focused on, driven partly by Facebook’s favorability toward displaying that type of content in users’ newsfeeds.

People ages 18-34 made up 45.8 percent of The Post’s overall audience, while the group was 43.6 percent of 9NEWS’ audience in August, comScore reports show. Those 25-44 years of age — older millennials and younger Generation X users — were 47.5 percent of The Post’s audience, and 48.1 percent of KUSA’s audience.